Chinese seamen arrived in Hamburg as early as the 1890s. With the boom in merchant shipping at the beginning of the 20th century, shipping companies such as Hapag and Norddeutscher Lloyd increasingly employed workers from China, mainly as stokers and coal-pullers, as they were considered by racist stereotypes to be particularly ‘heat-resistant’. In the Hamburg of that era, Chinese people mainly opened pubs and laundries, and a kind of ‘Chinese quarter’ developed around Schmuckstraße in St. Pauli. The neighbourhood was often portrayed as dangerous and mysterious. Newspapers picked up on rumours of drug dealing and underground tunnel systems. In 1925, the right-wing conservative ‘Deutsche Zeitung’ wrote of the ‘yellow peril’.
Racial discrimination against the Chinese population, especially the working class, became increasingly severe during the Nazi regime, from 1933 to 1945. On 13 May 1944, the Secret State Police (Gestapo), led by Commissioner Erich Hanisch, finally arrested Chinese nationals in Hamburg in a joint action with the criminal police. A total of 130 Chinese men were arrested, mainly in St. Pauli, on charges of ‘aiding the enemy’, as the Chinese Republic had formally joined the Allies on 9 December 1941 and had also declared war on Germany. The men were taken to the Fuhlsbüttel ‘police prison’, which the Gestapo used as a concentration camp and detention centre at the time.
The Chinese men imprisoned there on 13 May 1944 were beaten and tortured for months. Several of the victims reported after the war that Hanisch was particularly known for his brutality. A group of 60 to 80 men were transferred to the Wilhelmsburg ‘labour re-education camp’ in September, where they were forced to work in the surrounding industrial area. They repaired a damaged railway line and worked in the refinery of the mineral oil company Rhenania Ossag (now Shell), often being beaten by the guards. Many suffered from hunger.
During the ‘Chinese Action’, the Gestapo also focussed on German women who lived in partnerships with the men. Many of them had already been repeatedly defamed by the German population in previous years as indecent women and as prostitutes. In line with Nazi racial policy, they were accused in 1944 of ‘endangering the German people’ via their relationships with the Chinese men. At least one of these women was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp as a result, while another victim reported brutal threats of murder and violence by Erich Hanisch against the child of a Chinese man who had been arrested.
In the course of the ‘Chinese Action’, Gestapo officers robbed many Chinese people of their possessions and ransacked their homes and pubs. At least 17 of the arrested men died as a result of the mistreatment and forced labour in Fuhlsbüttel and Wilhelmsburg. It is difficult to determine the exact number of victims, as few documents have survived.
After the end of the war, almost all of the survivors sought official recognition for their persecution by the Nazi regime and compensation payments. Although the treatment of German-Chinese relationships, among other aspects of the persecution, pointed to the racist motives of the Nazis, the Office for Restitution rejected all applications in the spring of 1951 on the grounds that the Chinese people had not been arrested ‘because of their race, but because of their political attitude towards the Allies’. It based its decision on the assessment of ‘aiding the enemy’ by the Hamburg criminal police, which, in contrast to the Gestapo, was regarded as an ‘unburdened’ and ‘apolitical’ institution – even though the criminal police were demonstrably involved in the implementation of Nazi racial policy and crimes.
Since 2012, a memorial plaque in Schmuckstraße in St. Pauli has commemorated the victims of the ‘Chinese Action’ of 1944, and several stumbling blocks have since been laid. There has been no financial compensation for their descendants.
